SkyTerra's Inception

Episode 1 - SkyTerra's Inception Ross Jordan: [00:00:00] Welcome to the SkyTerra podcast, where we are empowering your business to do more. I'm your host, Ross Jordan. Every other week, we'll explore the world of technology, what has changed, how it might impact your business and why it matters to you. We will bring you interviews with business and industry leaders and discuss how technological advances impact your business and our lives. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a professional in the field, or just curious about the future, this podcast is for you. So grab your headphones and join us on this exciting journey into the world of technology. Let's get started. Welcome to today's episode of the SkyTerra podcast. We're thrilled to have a special guest with us today, Darren Schriever. Darren is a seasoned professional with extensive experience in the technology and business sectors. Darren's also a partner and one of the two co founders of SkyTerra Technologies, which was founded in 2015, where he leads SkyTerra's [00:01:00] technology infrastructure and engineering core. A thoroughly detailed engineer with over 25 years of experience, he has worked in the fields of finance and education information technology as an administrator, a director, and a manager for such companies such as BlackBaud, NaviSite, and Wellington Management. Darren is also an excellent and articulate communicator, offering clarity and simplification to engagements that are often complex and abstract. An effective executive, Darren regularly and successfully guides teams on the importance of big picture strategy all the way down to finite details for deployment. Darren is renowned for his ability to simplify the complex. In my own personal experience with Darren, in times of chaos, Darren finds a way to simplify, organize, and unify resources to drive to the outcome they need. In addition to his co founding role at SkyTerra, as well as co-founder and board member and technical advisor at Skylytics Data, Darren also volunteers as a fire captain and EMT for Amherst Fire and Rescue in New Hampshire, a role he's quite passionate about. [00:02:00] He's heavily involved with many community events and associations such as the 9 11 Memorial Stair Climb and the Amherst Fire Department Honor Guard, an honorary guard that pays tribute to fallen firefighters and their surviving family members in funerals and memorial services. Darren is a sought after speaker, an advisor, and a leader for the business community in New England, and a very proud father, building a legacy as a leader, a volunteer, and a businessman. Join us as we dive into a conversation with this dynamic leader, who is dedicated to driving innovation and helping businesses thrive in the digital age. What I'd like to do is kind of start off with some personal questions and just Darren, tell me a little bit about like, how did you get here? You have a very interesting background that although it does have IT, it's got so much more, but how did you end up getting to the point where, Hey, Dan, let's start a company? Darren Schriever: Well, how far back do you want to go? Ross Jordan: Well, tell me what you want me to tell. I mean, cause that's, what's going to, there's a lot of story there. Everything from the bouncing. I love the watch story. You don't have to share that if you don't want to, but… Darren Schriever: I'll tell [00:03:00] you what. So let me, let me start at the, at the beginning of my IT experience, right? My journey. And then I'll fast forward to where it really matters. So let's go back to mid to late 1990s. Darren is like you said, working at a bar outside of Fenway park in Boston. And quite honestly, I was having the time of my life. I wasn't really thinking about being much of a grownup. I was, I was going through the early part of my twenties with not a whole lot of responsibility and that was fine by me, but I was also very tired. So when you, when you're in that kind of lifestyle, it's cool when you're. 2021, 22, you get to be 23, 24, and you very quickly start to age out. And, you know, it was after a very long night and after a very long Red Sox homestand, which is when, you know, we have like 15 days in a row where you have 400 people in the bar and it's crazy by the end you're burnt out. So it was at the very end of that, that I'm, I'm at the back of the bar, just kind of cleaning up in a, in a slow moment. And who walks in, but Dan Bergeron and his dad, who I've known since, you know, [00:04:00] seventh grade. So, you know, they walk in and, you know, he just. Through our conversations, he notices, he's like, you look like you're done. It looked like you're, you're basically burnt out and just ready to be out of here. And I'm like, yeah, I kind of like, you know, I need a, I need to like get a real job and do real things and, you know, grow up. And he's like, well, I can probably get you more. I'm working. He goes, I'm working over at this startup down, you know, downtown and I can get you in there. And he's like, well, you know what computers? And I'm like, what's a computer, right? He's like, well, that's okay. We'll just, you know, we'll get you in. And like, maybe you can like, you can answer phones and fill a soda machine and you can learn how to do the computers in the side, like whatever, I don't care. So get me out of here. Right. So, uh, you know, flash forward a little bit. I, I get the job there and I am now a working professional for the first time in my life. And I was doing just that answering the telephone and filling the soda machine. And, oh, by the way, can you, you know, build these mailboxes for these users? Can you do this, that, and the other thing? And, and I had no idea what any of it was at first, but interestingly enough, [00:05:00] because of the type of activities they had me doing, I did something that a lot of people in it don't do, which is I completely skipped the front end and user support. I built desktops portion of my career and I went straight into the, you're working on servers and exchange and infrastructure in the backend, and you're going to skip right into that. And I took to it pretty well. I mean, apparently technology was easier than I thought it would be for me. Right. Yeah. So I've always been a problem solver by nature. My, my father's a mechanic and, you know, other avenues in my life have chosen have been problem solving type hobbies. So. I guess, you know, it isn't really no different when you think about it. It's just systems and the more money is involved in the more complex systems you get, it's still just systems. So troubleshooting and problem solving and those kinds of skills on that field. So I excelled earlier in my career. I did pretty well there. And I went through, you know, a couple of small. com startups that blew up into very large. com startups. Went public, went through an IPO and then the. [00:06:00] com bubble burst. And I spent like a year and a half building data centers all over the America and a few in Europe. And then I spent the next six months after that going and closing down data centers all over America and in Europe. And I decided, boy, this is not the place for me anymore. So I took my skills and I went to a financial sector into, which was, you know, worked for a hedge fund company, which was, I did Dan and a few other friends of mine were, had made the way over there at that time and spent the next decade of my life really cutting my teeth and growing up. You know, maturing as an IT resource, learning how to do things in the enterprise fashion, learning how to do things that are resilient and scalable and reliable and bulletproof and to, and to not cut corners and to basically build my standards for what I still do today. I learned then, right? First. So as I translate to the cloud, the same principles still apply. So I learned all that then I kind of, from a professional point of view, grew up in those 10 years over there. And then after then I was, you know, stuff a little bit of the [00:07:00] burnout there as most of us do in that, in that field. They ask a lot of you. So decided to go back to the small company route and move closer to home or worked close to the home. I was in Southern New Hampshire at the time and decided a small software startup is a good idea. I'll go there. Went there. I loved it. Love the work. I did company grew. Within six months, they're going to acquired. So that's beginning to cycle of go to a cool company. It sounds cool. They just need a little bit of work to get them right. And they're going to take off and you do all the work to get them perfect and they get acquired. So that happened…A total of seven times in my career? Four times, four times in a row, like bang, bang, bang, bang, just like that. And sometimes you end up where on top, you're the buying company. And sometimes you're the buyee and sometimes you have a job, but you don't like the new company. And sometimes you don't have a job because they already have someone that does what you do or four of you. So you move on. And what I noticed was, you know, over the years, as I was getting older, Old but older, the people who are doing these, starting these companies and building them and selling them off and, you know, kind of writing off into the sunset, they were getting [00:08:00] closer and closer to my age and it's not because, you know, they were getting younger, right. It's cause I was getting older and I'm, these are the, these are the kind of people, like they're in the same stage in life where maybe I want to be in that stage where I take my own shot at something and see where I can go with it. So after the last acquisition. Actually, actually the last several, two or three, I think I had reached out to my personal network of IT friends and said, Hey, anybody interested in taking a shot doing something and the timing was never right. And I would just get another job and I'd do my thing. And then a year and a half later, probably they'd get bought again. And I'd be like, Hey, you guys want to do it? You know, and it just so happened the last time that I reached out and, you know, Dan was, Hey, you know what? Yeah, I'm game. Let's let's do this. Yeah. Timing isn't perfect, but you know, we'll, we'll make it work. And we found a third and who's also willing to have a go at it. And we said, heck with it. We'll throw caution to the wind and see what happens. And you know, that's where SkyTerra was born. Ross Jordan: That's amazing. Darren Schriever: So, the rest is history. Ross Jordan: You kind of mentioned it as though it's, it's kind of nonchalant, but I mean, there's some real testing that [00:09:00] comes in from starting a company. I mean, did you have any idea what you were getting into or was it like, screw it, I'm done with everything else. Let's just give this a whirl. Darren Schriever: Oh yeah, no, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Here's what I thought. I thought it took hard work. If you just worked hard enough, that's all you needed. Well, that's one piece of the, of the recipe, but it's certainly not the whole thing. You have to have a lot of luck. You have to have. You know, some, some intuition, you have to make some good decisions by chance or by, or by just, you know, you know what you're doing and then you have to make some hard calls along the way and to do some things you don't want to do for a period of time and you have to figure out what it is you're really good at as an organization. So what I am good at, what Darren's good at. Not necessarily perfectly aligned with what Skyterra is good at. Cause me as an individual has a skillset. Skyterra as a company has this large eclectic skillset that, that supersedes anything I'll ever do. So figuring out what we're good at as an organization, as we grow has been one of the most rewarding, but also hardest things we've done along the way, right? Because it wouldn't be what I would do. I would not. If I was a one man company, we wouldn't be doing what [00:10:00] SkyTerra does. We'd be doing a subset of that, or maybe some of it, but it never would have thought or dreamed that we could have expanded and grown into what we are today, where the breadth of technology that we cover and our skillset is so broad collectively that, you know, I kind of think we can probably tackle anything we put our minds to. Ross Jordan: Yeah. So just following along with that, though, you're talking about the breadth and scope. There's a lot of things that happens to a company over the first decade, right? You guys have been through a lot. You've been through a pandemic. You've been through just the challenges of partnership, the challenges of employees, you've been through all of that. I mean, what drives you? What, what keeps you here? What, I mean, why do you keep wanting to do this? This is a battle every day. Darren Schriever: It is. It is. What did they say? The, success is rented and it's not owned and rent is due every day. Right. That that's pretty much how it is. Or the way sometimes I explain this to my girlfriend is that, I feels like you're swimming in a river. If you stop for just a second, it's going to take you down. Right. So you got to constantly, you know, you got to give every day and you got to do it all the time. No, it's, it's really, it's. [00:11:00] What drives me is seeing what we're building and seeing the organization, seeing the culture that we've, we've built here more than anything else, more than the technology and more than the cool projects we do. Seeing the group of people that we've collected and kind of built this, I don't want to be cheesy, but family that we've built here. Right. Out of nothing. What you think about it is there wasn't a SkyTerra and now there is a SkyTerra. We conjured it up by the thin air like it's second cousin to Harvey the rabbit, right? We just made it and that's really cool. And just seeing what we've accomplished and things we thought maybe we couldn't do when we did, you know, even if it was a struggle at times, that's what drives you to keep going because who knows what the ceiling is. Ross Jordan: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, you, you mentioned your team having come from another IT organization and having been engaged with you now for a few years. It's amazing to me that the talent set that you guys have been able to acquire, you have some of the brightest in the business, some of the most talented in the business, some of the most overachieving in the business, and you've been able to bring them all under [00:12:00] one roof. Nobody fights, nobody argues, nobody's, there's no contest of who has more acronyms behind their names. What do you accredit to being able to take such high value talent and put them into one room and organize them towards a centralized goal? Because that's what you've done. How do you do that? Darren Schriever: Yeah, so I think it started for us with The core. So they say that your first hires are your most important hires. And for us, we reached back to our, before we started interviewing and just talking like a normal company would for recruiting and finding talent. We dug into our network. We dug into our people. We knew the people we've worked with in the past, and we lean really hard on those people who worked in those organizations that we thought did it the right way or raised resources the right way, like grew good it technicians. And, and some of our past companies. You know, Dan and I are both part of what we would call like the A team, meaning whenever something bad happened, really bad, it was always the same six, seven people at two o'clock in the morning on the phone somehow, no matter how many people are in the company, there's always that same subset of people who goes to that, to figure [00:13:00] stuff out and to get it done, to solve those problems. Right. And you know that you can trust them cause they're, they're all on their A game. Well, that's what we did. We reached out to those people first and we recruited hard and we tried to get those kinds of resources to be the first ones we got. So. They were like-minded. They've been brought the same way we were in, in, in it, and it was an easy early expansion from that point of view, right? We didn't have to grow the culture. We kind of brought in the culture we knew already existed from these people and then as we grew past that, so you get past the year four or five, 10 employees when you can talk to everybody every day and, and Dan and I can be the ones who really drive that corporate culture and make sure that we're doing things the right way and staying on, you know, on target. Once you get past that, you have to lean on those people. To expand that culture and to have to be the ambassadors for the next person that comes in. And maybe you don't get to talk to every day because when you're 50 employees, you don't get to talk to all your employees. And that's really kind of where it started, you know, was there. And now we have that core, we have that core culture. Then we bring in people from the outside who we haven't worked with, but we vet them out. We interview a lot of times when we bring people in, probably an excessive amount. [00:14:00] And we're really trying to figure out if they're a good fit and if we're a good fit for them. And what we find out is not only do people come here because they like the culture and they like the way we operate, the way we do business, not the business we do, but the way we do business, they like it to the point where they think it's a good home for them. And then when they get in here and we've vetted out their technical skills, we know they're a players in their own, right? Well, you don't get a lot of. You know, look at me. I have all these, I have all these acronyms after my name, because as soon as they get into their very first project, they realize that everybody else here is just as strong as they are. Right. So, and that is a very humbling experience to somebody who comes in thinking I'm the, you know, I'm the King B here. I can, you know, I'm the smart guy. I'm the smartest guy in the room. I will tell you first off, I would never want to be the smartest person in the room, and I worked very hard to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am and, you know, all that does is, is make everybody else. Raise their game. Absolutely. Yeah. Ross Jordan: Absolutely. Darren Schriever: It's a self self-sustaining kind of a cycle. Ross Jordan: That's a great way of putting it too, because a rising tide lifts all ships, right? [00:15:00] Darren Schriever: It does. Yep. Ross Jordan: So success isn't an accident, right? I mean, you don't just, as you said, kind of wing it getting started and surround yourself with good employees. I mean, there's a lot of companies that have done that and not been able to make it. What do you attribute? There just comes a point where you have to cross this precipice and it's like, it's almost like all commit or it's no commit. I mean, Darren Schriever: So for me and Dan and I've had these conversations for us, it was, we made the conscious decision several years ago when we're at that, that kind of tipping point when. You know, a lot of companies have good success for a year or two or three, and they, they get something going and they can't sustain it. They can't take it to the next level. And that just pitters out, or they have some kind of epic failure or they grow too fast and implode or something happens like that. You know, for us, we were at that point where like we could have gone any of those routes and we made a conscious decision. We want to focus on. Execution. We want to focus on the work that we do and the relationships that we build. Do it right. Do good work. Do right by our customers. Do right by our employees. Treat people the right way. And [00:16:00] then just have faith and patience that eventually it'll, it'll turn into something better. And we've always just done that. Just, you know, head down, do your work, do a good job, do right by the customer, do right by your staff. And we've always said the money will come. Don't worry about the money. We don't, we don't run this company as a dollars and cents organization. We never have. And we never will. You know, we're doing things the right way. Do we have the right people we want to work with us? You know, do we like coming to work every day? You wake up on Monday and go, Oh, or you wake up Monday and go, all right, what's in it this week? And, you know, we want not only us, but everybody that works with us to have that same kind of feeling. So I think that conscious decision to focus on execution and relationships. For me, that's, that's, I think what kind of got us from that fledgling company who may or may not make it, but it has a cool idea to where we are today. Ross Jordan: I think that, and again, coming from another organization, I'm on the business building side of things. I don't have to, you guys have to keep my promises, right? I mean, for, for lack of a better way of saying it, [00:17:00] I have to learn what I can and can't promise. I have to learn what I can and can't talk about. And there was a lot of gun shy experience from my prior, you know, yeah, go tell him we can do that. We'll figure out how to do it later. And then you never could. And you'd end up the integrity was, was decaying. You guys are the opposite, right? I mean, one of the things Dan said, when I joined the organization, he says, Ross, just do what you have to do to make sure that client's a client in a decade. And when you think about that, you can't do what's right today. Always. You have to do what's right for 10 years from now, which means. You may not make money today, but you're going to do the right thing. That's that's, a challenging place to be as a business owner, right? Darren Schriever: It is because that means at some point in your career, you're probably saying, where's my paycheck coming from? Cause the money doesn't come in right away, right? It takes a lot of time. Traction takes time. And that takes, that takes time to have that kind of model take off and do that. But we, we also had that same time when we said, Hey, let's focus on execution and, and, and relationships. We also said, we're going, you know, this is the last nail in the coffin for a fab, anything for a buck, you know, a lot of companies they'll get to a certain point [00:18:00] because they do that. They come in and say, okay, I want to do a, B or C when I started the company. And then they realize they're going to have to do the whole alphabet just to, just to keep the lights on. And for a certain amount of time, that's okay. You do what you got to do over that period of time. You should be growing as an organization, focusing on what you do best, what you want to do best. You know, what can you be the best at the world at and your organization focus on that. Right. And let everything else kind of go to the wayside. And well, you know, we decided it was, yeah, we were really good at execution. Ross Jordan: No, absolutely. Under promise over deliver. I think that's been the experience with, with most clients I've had. So when you look at the market as a whole, as a company, You're not the only one in this, in this niche market, right? I mean, there's a lot of managed service providers. There's a lot of people that have specializations. There's a lot globally. That's, that's a very, that's a very thick market with clients and competitors. But how do you, as, as a founder, find yourself differentiating? If you're in a room of people and somebody said, what do you do? How do you describe [00:19:00] what you do so that you set yourself apart from the rest of your competition? Darren Schriever: Well, for me, It's kind of like, I won't say we don't have competitors. We have lots of competitors, but what I say is we don't necessarily compete. At least I don't explain that if we're, you know, if a customer is trying to shave every last penny and their job is to get something there to next, next finish, get this job done point solution. Cut the check small as they can and move on. I will tell them then, you know, I know a lot of people I can have you work with, but it's not us, right? We're not that kind of company. We're here to build a relationship with you. We're here to do, to be a long term partner with you. And if that sounds like a good fit for you, if it resonates with you, then come work with us. If it does resonate with you, then it buys us a lot of sticking power and it gets you through a couple of, You know, bumps at the beginning of the relationship. If they, if both of you believe that's what you're in it for, because the client really thinks that they really have our best interests at heart and they're really going to do right by us. And they wouldn't steer us wrong. They're not perfect, but they won't steer us wrong intentionally. Right. [00:20:00] Then, you know, maybe when someone other cuts you by 5%, they stay with you. You know, maybe, you know, maybe when you make that inevitable mistake, but you don't hide it and you put it up front and you're transparent and you just work the problem and fix it. And then you own it afterwards. You know, then, then they say, okay, we can trust these people. We can trust right. Ross Jordan: Right. Darren Schriever: That's how we compete and win. And that's what I tell people. If you're looking for that and a partner, then you're talking to the right people. Right. If you're looking for, you know, next, next finished, here's your check. Then, you know, that's, that doesn't, that doesn't get me out of bed in the morning. Ross Jordan: No, absolutely. So you and Dan have also had the vision to generate another company on the side that kind of does different side of it, right? I don't want to talk too much about them at this point, but that's, that's almost being predatory right to SkyTerra's growth, because ultimately you have to get that engaged somewhere down the road. So that's, that's a pretty risky move. I want to explain that if you could, that'd be great. Darren Schriever: Well, I think it is and it isn't. I [00:21:00] mean, it's, it can be considered okay. We're, we're doing something that could compete with ourselves. The way I've heard it described that kind of resonated the best with me was think of it as plumbing, right? So SkyTerra builds the pipes, they build the system and they build the valves. They build the controls. They have this beautiful, well, you know, engineered system that doesn't leak and does what it's supposed to. You get water when you want, you don't get water when you don't. Well, that's what SkyTerra does. And the, you know, the other venture we started, you know, You know, they, they deal with the water, right? So they're, they're, they're, so, you know, they're a data company, right? Where we're more infrastructure and controls and security and scalability and reliability, and they are data. So how do you, how do you derive value out of the data that you have? So if you're a customer that has, you know, a billion data points that you don't have any idea how the heck you can generate a competitive advantage out of that data. Well, that's what, that's what we do there. Right. We figure out, [00:22:00] we figure out how can we take the data you already have and Right. Right. And, and tell you how to find a, and find a competitive end up or how, or how to make some sort of, uh, you know, how do you find efficiencies in that data? So that, that's really what the other company does. And it really doesn't compete because, you know, like I said, we're building the pipes and they're dealing with the water. Ross Jordan: Okay. That's a great analysis. When you look at the future of where SkyTerra is going to be five years from now, I'd love to be able to grab this interview and talk to you five years from now and say, Hey, here's where you thought you'd be. If you had to look ahead, what do you do next? I mean, you've got a good foundation. We're still growing the business. That's not going to stop. Right. But where's the next step for you? Where do you see SkyTerra going next? Darren Schriever: The immediate future is easy to see. Like I look at forecasting kind of like vision, right? What's right in front of you is very clear. The further away it gets, the fuzzier it gets. So, you know, what is SkyTerra doing next? Well, we're at this transition point, I think, where we have always said, and you've probably heard this a million times, [00:23:00] Ross, that we bake the concepts of security into the DNA of every single thing we do, right? We're always thinking security. We're always thinking. You know, best practice is raw. Are we doing this the right way? Are we opening ourselves up to risk and those kinds of things, but we've never called ourselves a security company because we don't want to, we never wanted to kind of jump that bridge and say, okay, no, if we're going to call ourselves a security company, we have to really be good. Like that. We have to be security experts and what security experts we thought meant five, 10 years ago means something different than it does today. There's used to be a security layer. Now the security is literally embedded into everything you do, everything you do. Ross Jordan: Everything you do, right. Darren Schriever: It's so funny that the security. Sector has kind of come to us rather than us going to them. When we say we baked security into the DNA of everything we do, well, guess what, every single product in the world does now, right? And we're in a meeting or a leadership team. And I forget who was it said it was the, Dan or myself had said, we have to stop saying that we're not a security company. We have to start saying, I think we are now. And it's okay because not only are we, but we're [00:24:00] really good at it too. Yeah, we've been doing it for 10 years. We just haven't been saying that we're doing it. Right. Right. So, so the next step for SkyTerra is to build it out in the vault and see where that goes. We're SOC, NOC, compliance. Data governance, all these, all these buzzword terms you hear now that everybody wants to talk about all the time. Well, not only are we doing them, but we're comfortable doing them because we have a really broad and deep skillset in all of these areas. So that's what's next for SkyTerra is developing that and blowing that out. And then, and then overlaying that to everything else that we do. What comes after that? I don't know. I'll tell you five years is a long time in the world of the cloud to tell you what you're going to be doing in five years. What we'll be doing in five years is we will be executing well on a well thought out vision. How's that? You know, I don't know if you spent a lot of time looking at our, our mission statement or any of that stuff, but we don't use the word technology anywhere in it. Right. SkyTerra, we empower businesses through smarter solutions. That's it. So who [00:25:00] knows what technology we're going to use? Who knows what sector it's going to fall under? Who knows whether it's security or whether it's data governance or whether it's something we haven't even heard of yet comes out, whether it's AI, but AI is totally taken over and we've got our fingers in that now too. So, you know, what comes next? It's less scary to me because I think our approach to what comes next is tried and true and is solid. And I think that we focus on execution. We focus on. Whatever decisions we have in front of us, we do right by us and do right by our customers and everything will be fine in the long run. Ross Jordan: So you've, you've addressed kind of where you came from, where you started, how the company organized things that you did with the employee base and how you manage that. We've talked a little bit about the customers, but when you look at your Your foundation of customers. Let's just take today as a snapshot. I think they cover a lot of industries. They have a lot of different compliance requirements. They have a lot of different needs and some of them are international, right? They're not all in your backyard. What do you see the cloud doing for [00:26:00] SkyTerra as you move forward in being able to, to enhance that? How to, how to make the cloud makes it sound so easy to do business, but it's not. It's ever evolving. It's ever changing. How do you deal with it? Darren Schriever: Well, it's funny. We tell our clients all the time that, you know, the cloud is either the most or the least secure place you'll ever put your data, it all depends on how you build it and what you do with it when you're there, you know, Microsoft doesn't build anything that's more or less secure than anybody else does. They give you all the tools to build it as secure as you need it to be, but you can poke holes into it and make Swiss cheese out of it like anybody else can. A firewall is only as good as the rules you have in the firewall. You know, data, you know, data governance is only as good as the policies you have in place that govern that data. So it becomes less about the technology and the tools and where you are. And then it becomes more about the. How you approach it, how you think about it. So for us, we started with that core group of people who came from that really kind of mature business enterprise model. And one thing we had that we all cut our teeth on there was [00:27:00] compliance and security, compliance and security. We, we are all well versed in that so that when you get hit with some new compliance standard, you haven't heard of before, or something that's brand new. I won't say it doesn't matter, but it's not completely foreign. It's all just a different flavor of ice cream that you have to figure out, you know, how to make it work. And, and we've been successful at doing that because it's the approach that matters more. Break it down to its most basic components. Everything is a, you know, comes out a list of things you must comply with and then how you comply with them as the art. Yeah, as long as you know, long as you're doing it, how you comply with them is the art. Can you prove it? Can you provide evidence? Can you, you know, can you do it repeatedly? Can you do it passively? Does it require intervention or not? Those kind of things. I think what we're moving towards really is, is it used to be a lot more around policies that humans had to follow and technology that were tools that would help them You know, follow those policies and enable them to do those things right now. It's moving more towards passive compliance. You know, a user couldn't do something wrong if they wanted to [00:28:00] because the system just won't allow because there's a different ways to Sunday. That's protecting that 1 and 0 on their computer. Ross Jordan: That's interesting. That's a great way of putting that too. I might steal that from you. So, we've had a couple of incidents recently where we've, we've had customers that were not involved with us in terms of managed services, or we're not doing their security, or we're not doing a lot for them, but we've maybe done something for them. I've had a couple instances recently where those clients have had challenges with security. Explain or help people understand. Although those were very unique situations from each other and very different ways that they were breached, in the review, as we got in and we started to see it, we identified quickly what had happened. If you're a company listening to this for the first time, and you don't know what to look for, where do we start? Where does that client start in terms of their security roadmap? What are the questions they need to ask of their IT team first? Right now, do we have this? [00:29:00] Yeah, Darren Schriever: Well, I would say, you know, without talking about technology, just talking about, you know, very broadly, do you have visibility? Do you have full visibility into your environment and your data? Do you even understand what your data is? Do you, like, if I said, Hey, you know, tell me everything you have, show me everything you have, can you even do that? A lot of companies don't even understand or have a full visual of, you know, the scope of their environment. Ross Jordan: The proverbial painting glass. Darren Schriever: Yeah. Yeah, right, exactly. So they have, they have, you know, maybe they have a lot of shadow IT going on. Maybe they have multiple completely separate organizations within the organization doing things that they're, that the left hand doesn't talk to the right. So the first thing I think you have to tackle is visibility. And one of the things that we do is we come in and we try and paint that picture. Hey, come help us. We're in trouble. We've been compromised. We have some things bad's happening. The first thing we want to do is, you know, figure out how big and bad it is. Do you even know we've had clients said, Hey, we have. 200 and something systems out there. And, and, [00:30:00] you know, we've got a dozen machines that are like saying they're compromised, but what do we do? So first thing we want to do is get eyes on it. And what we usually find is you have like 730 something machines out there, not 200 and something. And they have, you know, they didn't realize the magnitude of their own environment, never mind the scope of the problem. So paint that big picture first. And then when I tell people, there is no such thing as secure or insecure. There is only more or less secure. So it's a continuum that you move up and down the dial on. And our job as you know, good stewards to our customers is to improve your security posture. You will not catch me saying you are now secure to anybody ever. Well, you hear me say is. Your security posture is better than it was yesterday. And tomorrow will be better than it is today. Right? And that's what you move towards. You move towards that. You move, there's a term someone threw out to me many years ago. I've stuck with me. You want your. Security exposure, right? Your risk exposure to [00:31:00] decrease asymptotically, which basically means ever, ever increasing zero, but maybe never reaching zero, but we were ever approaching zero. Uh, you know, so like I said, it's a, it's a compass heading, not a destination. And. You know, convincing our customers that this is the way to go and to get them out of the mindset of, if I just do A, B and C, I'll be secure. Right? No, you will never be secure. You will be more secure. There will always be risk and we will always have to do the best we can to mitigate that risk through smart human policies, through smart technical policies, through the right software and the right, you know, the right tools at the right time and the right people's hands. Ross Jordan: Absolutely. So, so start with the visibility, where do they go from there? Darren Schriever: Once you paint that picture, you kind of, you know, how do you get control of the situation? So think of it like, you know, that I do the fire department on the, you know, in my second life. So, you know, scene size up is the very first thing you do. And that's why I basically said you get there, you do a scene size up. Okay. What's really happening here? You get a 9 1 1 call because someone's got a broken leg. Okay. You get [00:32:00] there. You do a scene size up. You're like, uh, okay. What really happened is 35 people got into a giant brawl. That person's on the ground cut with a broken leg, and there's 15 people over there really angrily looking at me, not wanting me to help. All right. So that's the situation. Not, you know, not the person with the broken leg. So first thing you do is that size up. And then you do, you know, you, you basically, you, you do what's most important next. So you got to figure out whatever that most important next step is. Is it to get the end points on the control? Is that your biggest exposure to you have to get maybe agents in all your environment to get the report to a central console so you can paint that. That picture. A lot of times we want to do is you want to get visibility. When we say visibility, what we mean is, for example, let's put the defender for end point on all your, on all your end points. Right. Cause that will start telling us the big picture. You may know, okay, I have these machines, you know, that are reporting issues, but that's only part of it. What you really want to know is look, it's moving, it's moving in this direction. It's evolving. It's, it started here. It started in, you know, South America and now it's going to Canada. And then, and then [00:33:00] they're entering through this entry point. Do you have to tackle email first? Do you have to tackle the end points first? So once you get that, once you paint that picture, you have that full visibility of what's going on, then you can make an informed decision as to what to do next. And it's different every time. Ross Jordan: Very good. I've seen size up. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. This last year, we've had a lot going on with artificial intelligence, right? With, with chat, GPT, with, with all of that. If, if somebody is still trying to understand the impact they have, that will have on their organization. Thinking of it from an executive level like your own, what does an organization need to put in place to protect themselves from what AI could do if they didn't know? What do they not know that they need to know? Darren Schriever: Well, one thing they probably don't know is, maybe some people don't know, is that just about everything you put into a chat engine is data for the world to consume now. Right. So if you're out there in the, and they open GPT engine, it's going to inform that, you know, that machine that is going to, you know, be there for the next person. So if you put proprietary data out there, if [00:34:00] you say, Hey, I need to rewrite this proposal for me. That kind of thing. And you're putting data in there that you wouldn't want to just post on the internet while you just posted it on the internet. Right. Yeah. So you want to make sure that you're not doing that. You understand that that's the world you're living in now. AI is a tool in the toolbox. It's not something to be feared. It's not something to be ignored. It's not something to be just widely adopted either. It's something to be used when it makes sense. Like a tool, you know, when you have a nail that you want to put into a board, you go grab a hammer, you don't grab a screwdriver. Yeah. So it's just a tool at your disposal. And if you use it properly, and if you wield it properly, you will get great results from it. If you do it haphazardly, you will get poor results from it. Microsoft has a really cool way of handling with co pilot. So if you have particular license and you're a logged into Microsoft edge, not to get technical, right. But if you're using their license and their, and their browser, and you use their chat engine in there, that data is private privacy organization. Never leaves your organization. It's very, very important that you [00:35:00] know that, okay, I can, I can I still tell people don't 100 percent trust anything because it's, it's AI, but, but you can trust it more, you know, you're rather than going to chat GPT, you're going to use Bing chat. And because you're logged in with your corporate account, it knows that that data can't go anywhere. It won't inform that, that learning machine and it won't tell the whole world what's going on there. So that's one way to handle it, one way to keep it in check. And the other thing is, you know, encourage your teams to use it, but encourage them to use it responsibly. One thing that people use AI for and, and, and chat engines for a lot is scripting. It's one of the, one of the bigger uses out there is to do, to write technical scripts. How do I PowerShell this? How do I bash this? And what I see a lot of people just using those answers blindly. So they're asking questions outside of their bailiwick. They don't know what they're talking about to begin with. And when it gives them an answer, you have no idea if it's the right or the wrong answer. You just see code and you try it. Well, that's very dangerous. What I encourage people to do is know what you're talking about. Hey, I'm trying to do this. Ask a better question. I'm trying to do a, b, and c. How do I make this particular function get this particular result? [00:36:00] Ask those very specific questions. And then when you get the answer, make sure you understand what the heck is telling you. Don't just take it blindly on faith. You have to know if you don't understand why it did something, look it up. Don't just take it. It's not a quick fix. It's not a quick answer and run. It's a tool that you can use to help get you over a roadblock or a stop. Or I can't, I can't get this thing to parse properly. What the heck? And you ask, you know, Bing chat and it gives you a great answer. And because you know what you're doing already, you're just stuck at a certain point. You're like, Oh, half the time. I'm on the phone with one of my engineers and I don't do as much engineering as I used to, but I'll, I'll encourage them to take that route. Let's go see what, you know, let's go, let's go to the bank and see what happens. And we'll go there and we'll ask a really good question and they'll give us a cool answer. And we'll be like, wow, that makes total sense because I know what I'm talking about. I know the language I'm working in. It just gave me something I, maybe my brain hadn't used in 10 years or filled the gap for me. And that's how you use it as a positive tool for change. As opposed to making it a crutch that could potentially make your resources weaker and weaker by just having to do all [00:37:00] your work for you and not knowing what the heck it's doing. Ross Jordan: Yeah, there's something to be said about not just applying that code, but understanding how that code will affect or impact other systems within the organization. So you spent an hour with me, almost an hour with me, and thank you very much for that. But I'm going to close with a question that I find interesting to get the answers back because nobody answers it the same. But what do you like about running SkyTerra? Darren Schriever: What I like most about running SkyTerra is when somebody I'm talking to Maybe I'm working with a resource and that person is not really up to my level on something and through just constant, regular relationship building and working with them through projects or whatever you get to that certain point where you realize they make, they make a comment on a phone call with a client or they turn it into a piece of work or they, or they do something and you realize, okay, They're like, they've surpassed me, like better than me. And that's, that's like, [00:38:00] I love that. I love nothing better than, than having a whole bunch of people who. You bring it at level “A” and they're just, you know, they come in and they're on level they're on level “X” by the time they're, you know, they're done with you and, and to see that growth and to see everybody find excitement and, and interest in what we're doing here. And they actually like what they're doing. And then you see them just galling up knowledge, like it's, you know, like it's vitamins and they love it and they grow and they grow past you and they exceed you. That's, that's it. That's what I like. Ross Jordan: That’s cool. That's a really, really good… Darren Schriever: Cause I'll tell you why. You know what the flip side is Ross? What keeps me up at night is that it's all on me. And when I feel, if I ever feel like it's all on me, that's what keeps you up at night. When you feel like you have a strong team surrounding you that you know, that you can count on and that collectively we can accomplish to anything we put our minds to, I sleep like a baby. Ross Jordan: Yeah, that's brilliant. Well, I have gone through most of the questions that I wanted to address today. Like I said, there was, I'll, I'll be listening to this. I'll be looking at what it is. We talked about what else we need to address. I've already identified a few things I want to go back and talk to Dan [00:39:00] about further. I may come back and spend a little bit more time with you. I can't thank you enough. It's. One of the things that I've always enjoyed doing, and some people call it salesmanship. Some people call it, you know, the business development, you can call it whatever you want. But the truth is, what I've always enjoyed is hearing what makes people tick, what makes people work. And it's interesting that you and Dan having the relationship you have for decades and decades and decades and even working together, how you guys look at things completely different. You know how they say opposites attract, right? It's, it's interesting what you guys find in the success of what you've built. Look at it differently. You see it differently, but it's the same building you guys work from. Darren Schriever: Yeah. Ross Jordan: It'll be interesting to help tell that story through these podcasts. Darren Schriever: So I always tell people…yeah, I tell people all the time. I'm like, you know, here's my answer. They say, why'd you start SkyTerra? Well, here's my answer, and if you want the other answer, go talk to Dan and find out why we started there. Because we have very different drivers and very different reasons and goals and everything where we're, you know, but. [00:40:00] At the same time, what we, what we want is the same outcome. What we differ on is how we want to get there. Ross Jordan: Yeah. Darren Schriever: We're ultimately want to go, like I said, everything's a compass heading. We have the same compass heading. We're just starting from different places and we're taking different paths. And, but we all, we all want the same thing at the end of the day, so. Ross Jordan: No it's interesting because it's working and I love that. Thank you so much for letting me do this with you. Thank you for your time today. We appreciate you listening to the SkyTerra technologies podcast. For further information, you can find us on LinkedIn or at www.skyterratech.com. Have a great day.